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July 20, 2020

Corona Virus Thoughts #10

More anti-mask meatheads about. To encounter them is to encounter sheer stupidity. They are dull in mind and sick in the soul. What brought them to this choice?

I saw another one the other day, a woman with a small child, in the grocery store. She looked sullen in the face. She was teaching her kid well.

Things are really seizing up in America.

I was in Oregon Tavern Age country the other day and it felt dead. A clearcut has more life.

I’m reading Gore Vidal’s political essays and novels of American history again. He was right about everything in our founding and expansion as a nation. Everyone should read him.

The sports chat dummies think there will be football this fall. It’s incredible to hear their delusional talk.

I wonder if professional golfers playing tournaments right no without any fans think what they are doing is irrelevant and a little embarrassing.

I just fed my chipmunk buddy Jimmers for the third time today! He’s the only routine I have.

I read on the Oregon Public Broadcasting news site that the Oregon Legislature is coming up with $4.7 million dollars for the Oregon Shakespearean Festival. This is on top of over $7 million the Festival has already received from the federal government and private donors to help them survive a canceled season. This seems like a highly dubious use of taxpayer’s money during the pandemic. I mean, look around! Look at the obvious needs!

Why not the Oregon Country Fair, too?

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.